OPERA
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Fresh off the boat from Italy, gourd-shaped Giulio Gatti-Casazza heads straight for Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. As the newly appointed general manager of the Met, he is eager to have a look at his new home. Mama mia! What he sees is enough to curl his beard. It's bad enough that the exterior looks like a brewery. But the backstage area is so cramped that it can hardly accommodate a P.T.A. pageant. Principal singers, he finds to his horror, have to rehearse in the ladies' powder room; scenery is stacked behind the building on Seventh Avenue. Just be patient, the board of directors tells him, the company will be moving into a new and spacious house in two or three years.
That was in 1908. Gatti-Casazza stayed on for 27 years, waiting patiently—but his singers never got out of the powder room. Not that the management wasn't serious about that new house. Indeed, the Be-Patient-New-Met's-A-Comin' recitative echoed through the old house more regularly than the Anvil Chorus. At one time or another, sites for a new Met were planned on 49th Street, 57th Street, 59th Street, 63rd Street, 110th Street, Washington Square, on the ground floor of the Seagram Building and underneath the Queensboro Bridge. In 1938, a 3,700-seat theater was actually built in Rockefeller Center to be used by the Met, but when the acoustics proved faulty, the company refused to move in, and it was eventually torn down. Many times blueprints were drawn up, models constructed, traffic studies made, fund-raising dinners held. But what with depressions, wars and chronically empty coffers, all the grandiose schemes came to little more than the ragged canvas castles of stage sets piled in the snow on Seventh Avenue.
But now, praise Gatti-Casazza, the impossible has dawned. Last week, in an explosion of unabashed pride born of years of frustration, the Metropolitan Opera formally opened a stunning new $45.7 million house in Lincoln Center. And what a house to come home to!
It stretches 451 ft. from front door to rear window—as long as a 47-story building is high. The gracefully arching fagade, soaring 96 ft. in cathedral-like splendor between the glass-and-marble rectangles of the New York State Theater and Philharmonic Hall, dominates the surrounding plaza like a queen among princesses. It is a fittingly magnificent capstone to Lincoln Center: the world's largest opera house set in the world's largest cultural complex. It is, moreover, a fitting memorial to an enduring art, for it symbolizes, if not a resurgence of opera (for opera has never before been so popular), at least the conviction that opera is an essential golden thread in the nation's cultural fabric. The mere existence of the new Met, in short, means that grand opera is headed for a grander future.
On opening night, smiling benevolently and dutifully playing host, was the wisp of a man who has led the cast of thousands to the Met's auspicious debut: General Manager Rudolf Franz Josef Bing. If he was looking more gaunt than usual, it was only understandable. "We," he said wistfully, "have been pregnant for so long."
To christen the offspring, Bing had scheduled the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Never was a musical event launched in such a tide of pageantry and publicity —and